The recent advent of electronic word processing has created an increased need for automated searching of words and phrases in electronic databases. Search engines like Google, for example, operate on short phrases or individual words that are input by an operator. The search engine then searches one or more databases, looking for words or phrases similar to the query. The results of the search query are then displayed to an operator.
There are some prior art techniques used in search engines that allow for some ambiguity of the query words. This provides a tolerance for misspellings and other errors that often cause the search engine to return with no results or irrelevant results. These types of techniques are commonly referred to as “fuzzy” searches. Fuzzy searches generally take longer to complete than exact searches as the searching algorithms must consider many more combinations of letters while searching the database. The list resulting from a fuzzy search tends to be more time consuming for an operator to consider as more results are typically provided.
Furthermore, fuzzy searches may also operate on phonetic spellings and predetermined groups of characters, which also increase the database searching times, while rendering the searching techniques to be limited to a specific language. In English for example, a “ph” is commonly pronounced as an “f”, so fuzzy searching algorithms written for an English database, may replace “ph” for “f” (and vice versa) when comparing the queried word to the possible candidate words in the database. Fuzzy searches in a Spanish or German database where a “ph” is replaced with an “f” (and vice versa) would yield inappropriate results, while further adding to the searching time.
Searching for names within an email or groupware application has become a task for which no adequate solution exists. For example, FIG. 1 shows a screen shot 10 of a Prior Art email system. By “screen shot” it is meant that an image displayed on a screen of a computer or the like at a particular point in time is reproduced as a figure. In this system, the user is prompted to enter the name of the email recipient, the subject of the email, and the text message itself. When the name of the recipient is spelled correctly by a user, the name of the recipient is commonly underlined to indicate that the address is valid or known. It is common however that while spelling the address or name of the email recipient, an error occurs. When an error occurs, a list of potential candidates is not automatically provided. A user may have to invoke a process by which they are allowed to access some type of alphabetical list (if such a list exists) in order to facilitate the process of correctly addressing the email.
There are many research papers on searching for proper names in databases as the best method for doing this still remains an open question, see for example Turpion Publishing, “Author Search,” and Identity Systems, “Identity Systems Fuzzy Name Matching”. Current prior art search engine techniques for searching for names are known but have substantial drawbacks. Further, these known and limited searching techniques are not found in email, workflow and groupware applications.